the berkeley rep magazine - Berkeley Repertory Theatre

eport
Before electricity, even before
candlelight, the world premiere of The
Iliad was performed under the brightest
light available: the sun. In ancient Greece,
plays were performed in the daytime
for the simple reason that the audience
couldn’t see at night. Forget about
spotlights, colored gels, or mood lighting:
either you could see or you couldn’t.
And that’s how it remained for
hundreds of years. Although other
advances (candles, oil lamps, and gas
lamps) eventually allowed theatres to
perform indoors and at night, none of
these devices could do more than make
the stage visible.
Until limelight. In the 1800s, a
British scientist named Sir Goldsworthy
Gurney discovered a way to create a
sharp, focused light by burning quicklime
with an oxyhydrogen flame. For
the first time ever, theatres were able to
direct the audience’s eye by highlighting
small areas of the stage. This was a huge
breakthrough. All of a sudden, theatrical
lighting overcame its inauspicious beginning
as basic necessity and became a
legitimate craft.
In 1837, the Covent Garden Theatre
in London made history with the firstever
use of limelight in a theatrical
production. It was an instant hit.
Limelight was 37 times brighter than
the strongest oil lamp at the time, and
unlike oil lamps, limelight didn’t fill the
theatre with smoke and soot. Electric
arc lights were also developed around
this time, but they were expensive,
noisy, and gave off a slightly blueish
light. Not that limelight was much
better, color-wise; although the name
comes from the quicklime, it also
produced a slightly greenish light.
Limelight—precursor to the modern
spotlight—was a major advancement,
but the technology still lacked any kind of
subtlety. “I would love to have seen a play
done in real limelight,” says Fred Geffken,
Berkeley Rep’s master electrician, “but I
also love the ability designers have now
to mold the light to affect the audience’s
emotions in each scene.” Fortunately,
that ability wasn’t far off.
In just a few decades, the
mainstream adoption of electricity
10 · the berkeley rep magazine · 2012–13 · ISSUE 2
Audrey Brisson, Patrycja Kujawska, and
Éva Magyar in The Wild Bride (2011)
changed everything once again. For
the last hundred years, electric-lighting
technology has accelerated at an
amazing pace. We’ve gained the ability
not just to light the room and direct
the eye, but also to color, soften, excite,
and amaze.
At Berkeley Rep, it takes a team of
four full-time electricians just to manage
the lighting instruments. They hang, focus,
repair, and run the lights for each of
our productions every season, all while
keeping up with the latest innovations
in theatrical lighting.
The tools we use today are quickly
being replaced by even more exciting
technologies, so we asked our electrics
department—Fred Geffken, Christine
Cochran, Kenneth Coté, and Anthony
Jannuzzi—to speculate on the most
promising developments on the horizon
for theatrical lighting. The consensus
was immediate: led lighting.
“Recently, with the push for more
energy-efficient lamps by the government,
the led industry has improved
the quality, intensity, and variety of
leds,” Fred explains. “One of the
advantages is the ability for one light
to produce multiple colors. This allows
designers the ability to adjust the color
at a moment’s notice to better match
the mood of the play.”
Although color mixing has been
around for a while, leds are more
energy-efficient and quieter than most
existing options. Plus, they’re brighter:
“The intensity and vibrancy surpasses
what conventional lights can do. Last
season, we used color-mixing led lights
in Emotional Creature, which made the
courtesy of kevinberne.com
color really pop.” And keep an eye out
for the return of the leds this season.
Fred says we’ll see them again when The
Wild Bride returns.
Interestingly, the exceptional
smoothness and brightness of leds is
actually its greatest weakness, at least
if you’re a lighting designer. “One of the
problems with leds is that the color just
doesn’t match the look of conventional
lights, especially as they dim,” Fred
notes. “Ever notice when a lamp dims
that the color shifts to red? Manufacturers
are now making led fixtures that
replicate that color shift so they can be
added to a show alongside conventional
lights without looking out of place.”
So our new technology is actually
mimicking older technology? It seems
counterintuitive, but Fred explains: “In
theatre, we’re always trying to replicate
the feeling of light in a certain place—
your dining room, bedroom, or hotel
room, say—or a quality of light like
candlelight, gaslight, limelight, or firelight.”
Because leds aren’t yet the norm,
for the sake of theatrical verisimilitude,
they’re stuck replicating the old styles.
But Fred takes a philosophical approach.
“It will be interesting to see, years from
now, as fluorescent, led, or the next
breakthrough in lighting technology
takes hold in our lives…one day, we’ll
be trying to replicate the feeling of that
lighting instead.”
From sunlight to candles, limelight
to leds, theatrical lighting is now coming
full circle, using the latest technology
to convince the viewer they’re in
Victorian England, the Industrial Revolution,
or even ancient Greece.